I Never Thought I'd Meet This Girl. Especially Not Like This

Rebel Bingo is a hard-core and hipsterized version of your grandma's Thursday-evening pastime.

You enter the concert venue and receive two paper game boards and a marker, then try to juggle them with a pair of tallboys while dancing to dub step and drawing on/getting drawn on by fellow revelers, which, for some reason, is totally cool with everyone there. The game has yet to begin.

I don't want to go, considering it's the end of a long workweek and I'm inappropriately rocking a button-down shirt, sensible khakis, and Clarks. But since my roommate, who works, like, a thousand hours a week, is still wearing his finance-drone suit yet positively jazzed to play a drunken rendition of the nursing-home favorite, I guilt myself into it.

The lights drop, music sounds, the MC explains the rules and gets us pumped for what's sure to be an ironically intense experience. After an unnecessarily epic but undeniably electrifying countdown, the game begins. Then two dancers appear, and there she is.

Her eyes look black. Same with the ponytail that falls at the small of her back when she's not whipping it like a lasso. A scowling expression on a delicate face makes way for a wagging tongue. A canvas of caramel skin flaunts a bevy of vividly colored but indiscernible tattoos. She's all charisma. And power. And hips. She's a blowtorch and the stage is crumbling to ashes.

The rest of the game is a blurry montage of lights and music and videos and prizes like a vintage-looking bike and a panda bear or panda costume or something. It's pretty awesome, but that doesn't matter. Someone call Liam Neeson: I'm taken. I'm captured like a planet in her gravitational pull, eclipsed by her once-in-a-lifetime darkness. Her body sings like a siren song as my ship, transfixed, drives closer to the sands of her lethal beach. She's a Venus flytrap. I'm buzzing.

The game ends, the DJ bumps more dub step, and as the crowd largely turns and heads for the door, I'm pushing against the human current towards the stage, which she's still incinerating.

I look like a sweaty wannabe Gap model and my Clarks are slip-sliding along the beer-drenched floor, which is not helpful when trying to long-distance dance-seduce a girl who is, oh yeah, a professional dancer. Beyond feeling particularly clumsy and uncool, I'm intimidated. Maybe it's her tattoos. Or bullring. Or effortless ooze of confidence and sexuality—juxtaposed with my current inferiority complex and rather lengthy dry spell. I'm dancing like a maniac trying to get her attention. She doesn't notice, but one of the security guys does and shoots me a glance like, "Da fuh?"

Eventually, defeated, I decide it's time to go. I'm waiting for my roommate to finish in the bathroom and then, in a moment of cosmic serendipity, the girl and her cohort materialize, walking in my direction. Reflexively, I dial up the smooth talk.

"I'm Girl X." (This is not the name she gave, but it was very clearly a pseudonym. And started with an X.)

In a brief and nervous conversation, I learn her fellow dancer is a DJ and say I'd love to see her spin. I weirdly give her friend my phone number and, more weirdly, my email address. Then they're gone. I take out my phone and text myself: "Girl X." My roommate emerges from the bathroom. Then we're gone.

A week passes. I don't hear anything from Girl X's friend, because why would I? Normally my defeatist attitude manifests itself in instant forgetfulness; I've blocked out the memory of dozens of missed connections and ones that got away. But Girl X is different. She's haunting, like a welcome nightmare.

If Desperation were a person, he'd wear an "I'm with Creepy -->" T-shirt. That's why I think to myself, How many people call themselves Girl X? and google her. Sure enough, there's her Twitter. I've recently pretentiously denounced online dating as "just not for me," yet here I am, full-fledged Twitter stalker. I decide to, you know, "play it cool" by not following her but instead starring a few of her tweets.

Unexpectedly, she responds with something clever and hysterical to one of mine, and next thing I know, we're tweet-volleying photos and videos about:

Kittens.

*Kittens on bikes.

Kittens on bikes wearing helmets.

Kittens on bikes wearing citrus helmets, like an orange peel or watermelon rind.

Obese kittens in overalls.*

After this last one, from her, makes me very literally LOL at work, I tell her so in a direct message. Then she cuts to the chase.

"Did I meet you last weekend? Either way, we should get together."

"Yeah, that was me. I'd love that."

"I knew it! How bout Thursday?" And then her phone number.

Whenever I enter a new contact in my phone, I also fill in the "Company" section, partially to remember how I know the person and partially to amuse myself. Hers reads:

Name: Girl X

Company: Rebel Bingo/Seriously?

How do you think our date will go? Have any entertaining "how I met him" stories?